Laboring in the obscurity he so richly deserves for over a decade now, your crusty correspondent sporadically offers his views on family, law, politics and money. Nothing herein should be taken too seriously: If you look closely, you can almost see the twinkle in Curmudgeon's eye. Or is that a cataract?

Tuesday, March 04, 2008

Heads or Tails #28 -- 7 things

Our stern taskmistress, Barb, the principal of Heads or Tails High, has given us a mathematical challenge today: List seven things from any category. Mathematical challenges are particularly tough for most lawyers, most of whom can only divide by three, but I shall accept the challenge.

A moment, please, while I center myself....

OK -- seven numbers: 1, 7, 10, 13, 19, 23, and 28.

These, it turns out, are the first seven "happy numbers" -- something I'd never heard of either before undertaking today's assignment.

Here's how they work:

72 = 49

42 + 92 = 97

92 + 72 = 130

12 + 32 + 02 = 10

12 + 02 = 1

Did you get that? Take a number and square it. Break the resulting number into individual digits. Square each digit and add them up. Repeat for the resulting sum... and do so as necessary until (quoting now from the Wikipedia entry) "the number equals 1 (where it will stay), or it loops endlessly in a cycle which does not include 1. Those numbers for which this process ends in 1 are happy numbers, while those that do not end in 1 are unhappy numbers."

Personally, I would have defined happy numbers as those numbers present on a check payable to me, while unhappy numbers would be defined as those present on a check made payable by me.

No, I don't know what these might be useful for either.

But you can't say you didn't learn something today while surfing the Internet. Does this make you happy?

OK, this is my favorite post of the week (I'm a math teacher), and no, I had never heard of happy numbers. This is similar to other types of numbers we play with in class occasionally. Thank you so much!! My HoT is here. Thank you.